Friday, October 17, 2008

Magic: Divine, Human, and Satanic (10.11.11)

We're just wrapping up with the Priestess before moving on to arcanum #3, the Empress. UF concludes the chapter by noting that scientistic materialism can only be "true" if we exclude all of the other planes that make the horizontal plane of natural facts possible, and isolate the realm of quantitative facts from the rest of reality.

At the polar opposite of this is the Hermetic-philosophical sense, or the "sense of synthesis," which is capable of a vision of the whole: "The scientific sense... summarizes the facts of experience on a single plane, in the horizontal. Hermeticism is not a science and will never be one. It can certainly make use of sciences and their results, but by doing so it does not become a science."

Or, one could say that profane science is the study of the relative, which is change itself. But Hermeticism is essentially the science of the changeless, which is to say, metaphysics. Metaphysics is the science of the permanent, of those things that cannot not be, for example, the Absolute, and by extension, the Infinite. Or, of Beyond-Being, and its child, Being.

Again, science can verify truth on a single plane, while the gnostic sense investigates the depth of said truth. Thus, any philosophy of naturalism can only be absolutely true to the extent that one fails to ponder its depth and significance. The moment you engage in the latter, you have disproved it, for you have revealed a vertical depth of truth and being for which naturalism can never account. You have left materialism behind. For to listen in expectant silence in the vertical space is to be "instructed by God." Coongratulations. It's your psychic bar mitzvah! So say goodbye to your spiritual childhood and leave mater behind.

Now, on to the Empress. As a brief aside, I think one of the reasons this book didn't resonate with me at first, is that it starts out a bit slow, at least relative to what follows. My recollection is that the book really starts to catch fire after card four or five, but we shall see. This chapter in particular had some bland spots for me.

UF points out that the Empress symbolizes the realm of sacred or divine magic, which is embodied in the formula that the subtle rules the dense, and all it implies. I suppose that when I first read the book, I was slightly put off by this whole idea of "magic," being that it's such a loaded word. But UF has a very specific meaning in mind. First, he notes that the only legitimate magic is that which is "authorized from above." And the only legitimate aim of magic is liberation in order to ascend. And the only legitimate formula is the combination of the two wills: divine and human.

Thus, real magic results from our alignment with the divine will in order to ascend toward greater freedom. A new power is born through the unity of divine and human wills. Elsewhere he quotes Peladin, who spoke of the application of the strengthened human will to accelerate the evolution of the living forces of Nature. This is accomplished through the science of love.

And remember from the previous card, that love is the essence of unity, or the free unification of twoness in oneness, even while preserving the twoness. "Sacred magic is the power of love, born of the union in love of divine will and human will." Freedom, love, magic, will, ascent, evolution, multiplicity, oneness... all of these things are interrelated in surprising ways. "This is the aim of sacred magic; it is nothing other than to give the freedom to see, hear, to walk, to live, to follow an ideal and to be truly oneself -- i.e., to give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, the ability to walk to the lame, life to the dead, good news or ideals to the poor, and free will to those who are possessed by evil spirits."

I won't bore you with some of the letters Bob receives testifying to the reality of this magic. People who couldn't "see" God now can; or people who couldn't hear, now do; or people who couldn't walk the walk, now dance the sacred coondance. But not one of these people attributes it to Bob. Well, maybe one person, but he was rather scary. The point is, they all "get it" -- that the magic results from aligning oneself (↑) with (↓), not by being a clone of Bob, God forbid, or I'll have to contact the authorities.

I usually have to reframe these ideas in terms of my own experience and understanding in order to appreciate where UF is coming from. I'm sure he wouldn't mind, for that is again how one moves down the spectrum from spiritual touch, to hearing, to synthesis and comprehension, then to projection and vision. No one else can give you the comprehension. It has to be your own, so it will naturally be inflected through the particulars of your own personality. Even Jesus -- who was a mode of the universal -- was nevertheless a human personality. True, he was "everyone," but he was nevertheless someone. This is what distinguishes him from merely mythological figures that are purely archetypal and therefore conventional.

UF then goes into a very important passage on what gets in the way, which is none other than the mind parasites of which Bob speaks in his book. If the object of sacred magic is liberation in order to ascend, then anything that intrudes upon or prevents that process is more or less parasitic.

Well no, that's not quite correct. In fact, it's not correct at all. Earth is not to be confused with heaven. We are not meant to live non-friction lives, for it is precisely the obstacles that present the opportunity for growth and transcendence. But there are "legitimate" obstacles, tests and trials that work within the Cosmic Law, and illegitimate ones that may look satanic, but are actually mostly human. Or, you might say that they are a kind of black magic which results from the alignment of the human will with the forces of darkness. Does this really happen? Please. Grow up. You've already had your psychic bar mitzvah. Now start acting like it, schmendrick.

UF makes the critical point that the Adversary never deprives anyone of his freedom. That is not his style, but more importantly, it is not his role. He's not some sort of street thug or community organizer. No: "Temptation is [his] only weapon and this presupposes the freedom of he who is tempted."

But one can obviously squander one's freedom, to the point that one is essentially "possessed" by the demon that one has co-created with the Adversary. As UF describes it, "One engenders an elemental being and one subsequently becomes the slave of one's own creation." And here is the money quote, as it coonfirms Bob's ideas about demonic mind parasites, which

"have been discovered by contemporary psychiatrists and are recognized as real -- i.e., as 'parasitic psychic organisms' independent of the conscious human will and tending to subjugate it." As such, "One need not fear the devil, but rather the perverse tendencies in oneself! For those perverse human tendencies can deprive us of our freedom and enslave us. Worse still, they can avail themselves of our imagination and inventive faculties and lead us to creations which can become the scourge of mankind."

Let's pause here for a little red meat for the base. Liberalism is obviously about freedom. But the founders always understood this in the manner outlined above, as spiritual freedom, i.e., the freedom to ascend. For example, in the words of John Adams,

“Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom.... We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.... We should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections.”

The Democrat party has long since abandoned the classical liberalism of America's founders for a leftism that is not just its political opposite, but its very negation. It is a collusion of man and his own lower forces in order to create hell on earth. Instead of a vertical freedom conferred by God and respected by the state, it promulgates a horizontal freedom granted by the state. But the state can create nothing. Just as it cannot create wealth but only take it away by force, it cannot grant real freedom, since that freedom is a priori and intrinsically spiritual. And by attacking and undermining religion itself, it results in the creation of a new kind of man-beast hybrid whose freedom is for his own sake. It is not even horizontal freedom, but merely the freedom to fall further into his own warped imagination, i.e., the Rule of the Mind Parasites.

Virtually all freedom-loving Americans have a sense of deep foreboding about what may come with the Rule of the Mind Parasites. But this is nothing new. UF quotes a passage by St. Paul, who spoke of how the entire Creation had been "groaning in travail," awaiting its hour of liberation, when it "will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God."

Isn't this inversion amazing, that the "irreligious" secular left -- precisely because they are irreligious -- are laboring under the fantasy that the world has been groaning in travail while awaiting the hour of... Obama? -- a shape-shifting cipher and compulsively lyin' Hawaiian who represents the quintessence of soothing hypnosis and oily seduction, the favorite methods of the Adversary? For he is the inverted image of the Empress.

To be continued....

*****

This post at Belmont Club has some implicit connections to mine. You figure them out:

"'It was a bold man who first et an oyster,' a wag once wrote. But many a timid man followed the bold. Once the first pedophile discovered holidays in Thailand or a perverted clergyman spread the word that children trusted men of the cloth it was only a matter of time before a kind of bubble blew up which created a whole new category of tourist industry and very nearly collapsed institutions which had lasted for millenia. When radical Islamists discovered that Western civilization made cars, airplanes, the Internet and biological science available to the common man it wasn’t long before mass terror attacks using these implements were under way. One day evil people make a business process or technological breakthrough and for a time, they have a boom which to us looks like a catastrophe. Imagine the excitement with which real scammers must have regarded Fan and Fred, or the derivative market, as you prefer. Seek and you shall find.

"It’s interesting to speculate about what bad guys may be looking for next. An amusing story is told about Kurt Godel, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century. It seems that Godel applied for US citizenship and proceeded to his examination in company with Albert Einstein and Oskar Morgenstern when it occurred to him to tell the judge about a logical loophole he had discovered in the US Constitution through which America could be turned into a tyranny.

"Einstein and Morgenstern coached Gödel for his U.S. citizenship exam, concerned that their friend’s unpredictable behavior might jeopardize his chances. When the Nazi regime was briefly mentioned, Gödel informed the presiding judge that he had discovered a way in which a dictatorship could be legally installed in the United States, through a logical contradiction in the U.S. Constitution. Neither the judge, nor Einstein or Morgenstern allowed Gödel to finish his line of thought and he was awarded citizenship.

"It’s amusing until one realizes how often we discover, at intervals of 50 or so years, how a cohort of people more or less simultaneously learn to game a system until it crashes. I really do wish the judge had let Godel finish, though the 5% of men in the world would have been listening to his words more intently than all the rest."

Black magic is real. You were right about the New Age movement being an exercise in intoxication. It intoxicates you to the point you don't even remember what freedom is, or who you are. I read MOTT after your recommendation two years ago. It set me free, or, it showed me the truth about the cage I had put myself in. Black magic promises everything and then hides you from yourself, so you don't even know what is right anymore. More specifically it makes you fear the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. Some of the things I've seen and experienced are not fit to print here or anyplace else. I went through with them, because if you put yourself outside the True, the Good, and the Beautiful the perverse is all you have left. Without God the perverse can be very seductive and intoxicating. If you read the Black Pullet or other old works of black magic you will notice how they promise wealth, women, power, long life, protection from ones enemies, and the ability to harm your enemies. These are things that could be very seductive to someone living in the past. Modern works of black magic do the same thing they promise one thing and slyly deliver another. This principle is central to black magic. Marxism is a good example of modern black magic. My point is just because something doesn't talk about spells, witches, demons, and occult rituals doesn't mean it isn't black magic. If you understand the principles, you will find the black magic is much more common then you realize. Even after you repent and "turn off the darkness" as Bob put it, it takes time for the light to set you right. The good news is that divine magic is more real then the black stuff. It is a gift which I'm am grateful for everyday. I cry every time I hear Amazing Grace, because it's True.

I realized something as I was rereading my post. Black magic promises you material things at the expense of the spiritual, while divine magic promises you spiritual things at the expense of the material. Of course the material scarifies really are not that great and important unless you are called to be a saint. On another note, I feel frustrated because the Truth behind all this is so big that I can't possibly capture it in words, or in thought. But I think Raccoons know exactly what I'm talking about.

I believe I may have detected a heresy in Bob's Unconscious's post, where he writes, "Even Jesus -- who was a mode of the universal -- was nevertheless a human personality. True, he was "everyone," but he was nevertheless someone."

While I appreciate what he was attempting to say, Cutsinger reminds us that Jesus did not exactly have a human personality in the usual way, if for no other reason than he was not just the third person of the Trinity made a particular man, but made man as such.

Yes, magic exists in a fundamental way - that is, when we speak of God's power manifest directly in the world, it is to some extent impersonal and useful. For creation to function, it seems to be required that God's power be broadly available, and it is under the right circumstances. Further, it is amoral in its accessibility, just as the rain falls on the just and the unjust.

Thus the possibility of both white and black magic.

However, harnessing that power is not so easy. Not only can it be done, it has been done.

I think you're right about that, though. Letter XIII quotes this passage from John. What leapt out at me at the time is the distinction that

"Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus..." (Emphasis UF's),

the implication being that they were special to Him in a way that other people were not. His personality may not have been the usual human one, but clearly he did have some of the usual characteristics.

Also if you'd like to understand Classical Liberalism as the Founders understood it, and applied it in writing the Constitution, try reading through the excellent presentation of the The Founders Constitution, from the University of Chicago Press and the Liberty Fund. Links to most of what they had in mind when doing the deed, and the ratification debates as well.

Bravo zulu, Bob's supraconcious and Petey! I'm still readin' this post, but this entire world series has been so full of heavenly steak (rare), and Ourmet delicacies that I'm stuffed with Overwhelming Goodness!Thanks! :^)

I'll betcha a bowl of possum stew vs. your coon stew that one day you recognize Barack as responding to sincere call from the same Big "O" you worship. Are you aware that he left a note at the wall in Jerusalem in which he addressed God with the words, "make me an instrument of you will". You know very well that no cosmic cretin would present such a freewill choice in writing if it not sincere. God is not mocked. Furthermore, shouldn't we recall that a consistent theme of the authentic spiritual journey is one of living through experiences of "who we are not" in order to gain first hand, experiential knowledge of thinking that we are ultimately called to have a role in correcting. Is it possible that Barack is awakening into a genuine mission in which he will one day, much like you have consistently done, turn around to address errors in some of the viewpoints he now espouses? I think so.

"Is it possible that Barack is awakening into a genuine mission in which he will one day, much like you have consistently done, turn around to address errors in some of the viewpoints he now espouses? I think so."

Hell no!All of Snobama's policies seek to impose socialism, even communism-light instead of liberty, and you believe he will someday change his mind and embrace liberty?

Make no mistake, God wants liberty for all, not the false messiahs social-communism laced with racism and America hatred.

Character matters, but Leftists and useful idiots (but I repeat myself) don't care about character or liberty as long as they get their "free" stuff that they feel they are entitled to.

People like you believe you are justified to take from the "rich" but in reality you are all just bitter and envious slaves of your own making who don't wanna earn your own way, so you make up these different words to make more useful idiots feel better about stealing from your betters. You know, folks who worked hard and earned what they have.

Folks who worked two jobs when they had to, small business owners who put in 12-20 hour days to succeed.

But somehow, HP, you think a man who spent 20 plus years in a racist, twisted church which is really a cult of the blackest hate and bitterness and envy is going to become a Raccoon because he lies his ass off every time he speaks.

Yeah, the same guy who mocks Joe the plumber and doesn't even pretend to condemn the Leftist attacks on the guy for askin' an honest question.

You are just another useful idiot at best. You can't speak honestly about the horizontal and yet, you believe you believe Snobama's Demon(s) is anything like our God?

I wouldn't be bettin' if I were you. You just might lose somethin' more than your freedom. You will anyway if you don't open your eyes.

Your words strike such a familiar chord: just had to read them again...

Virtually all freedom-loving Americans have a sense of deep foreboding about what may come with the Rule of the Mind Parasites. But this is nothing new. UF quotes a passage by St. Paul, who spoke of how the entire Creation had been "groaning in travail," awaiting its hour of liberation, when it "will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God."

Isn't this inversion amazing, that the "religious" right -- precisely because they are religious -- are laboring under the fantasy that the world has been groaning in travail while awaiting the hour of... McBain? -- a shape-shifting cipher and obsessively vexin Toxin who represents the quintessence of soothing hypnosis and oily seduction, the favorite methods of the Adversary? For he is the inverted image of the Empress.

Yes, this is a tribal shanty. Sing along even if you don't know the words. Especially so. Same tune, different ego. Carry on, you daring revolutionaries you!

Dupe, you're always so solicitous when you're sober. Now you can get on back to the couch where I'm sure there's a coon-eared copy of Alaskan Female Hunter, The Philosophical Underpinnings right there next to the can of reddi-whip.

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Location: Floating in His Cloud-Hidden Bobservatory, Inside the Centers for Spiritual Disease Control and Pretension, Tonga

Who?! spirals down the celestial firepole on wings of slack, seizes the wheel of the cosmic bus, and embarks upin a bewilderness adventure of higher nondoodling? Who, haloed be his gnome, loiters on the threshold of the transdimensional doorway, looking for handouts from Petey? Who, with his doppelgägster and testy snideprick, Cousin Dupree, wields the pliers and blowtorch of fine insultainment for the ridicure of assouls? Who is the gentleman loaffeur who yoinks the sword from the stoned philosopher and shoves it in the breadbasket of metaphysical ignorance and tenure? Whose New Testavus for the Restavus blows the locked doors of the empyrean off their rusty old hinges and sheds a beam of intense darkness on the world enigma? Who is the Biggest Fakir of the Vertical Church of God Knows What, channeling the roaring torrent of 〇 into the feeble stream of cyberspace? Who is the masked pandit who lobs the first water balloon out the motel window at the annual Raccoon convention? Shut your mouth! But I'm talkin' about bʘb! Then we can dig it!